The Supreme Court handed the Federal Communications Commission a victory on Thursday, upholding its ability to penalize telecommunications companies by finding that its scheme for levying fines is constitutional.
The high court ruled 8-1 in favor of the federal agency in the consolidated cases FCC v. AT&T and Verizon Communications v. FCC. Chief Justice John Roberts penned the majority opinion finding that the FCC’s penalty scheme does not violate the companies’ Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. The high court found that AT&T and Verizon did not have to pay the more than $100 million in fines for selling customers’ location data to third parties, agreeing with the FCC that the fine was presented to the companies as a preliminary finding, rather than a binding fine that created a debt to be paid.
“The FCC’s forfeiture proceedings fit comfortably within these precedents,” Roberts wrote for the majority. “The orders at issue did not settle the carriers’ legal obligations because, stated simply, they did not create an obligation to pay. And the orders did not reflect the ultimate determination of any fact because, before the carriers could have been made to pay, the Government was required to prove its case to a jury.”
Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter, writing in his solo opinion that he would have sided with AT&T and Verizon because the companies could not have known the fines were not binding when they were issued.
“AT&T and Verizon did what courts ordinarily encourage: They paid under protest and filed suit to get their payments back,” Thomas wrote. “Today, the Court punishes AT&T and Verizon for complying with a government order that they in good faith believed was obligatory, diligently preserving their objection to that order, and then litigating that objection so effectively as to cause the Government to change its position years later. I respectfully dissent.”
During oral arguments in April, multiple justices questioned the FCC’s apparent retreat from its previous position that the fines were binding. Despite vocal concerns from Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh that the FCC may have misled AT&T and Verizon about whether the fines were binding without a court order, all of the justices, except Thomas, sided with the FCC in the end.
Thursday’s ruling preserves one of the FCC’s most powerful enforcement mechanisms against telecommunications companies, and it comes two years after the Supreme Court struck down the Securities and Exchange Commission’s method of enforcing fines.
THE MAJOR SUPREME COURT DECISIONS REMAINING FOR THIS TERM
The Supreme Court has 23 opinions it has yet to release in cases it heard over its current term. The remaining rulings are expected to be released over the next several weeks, with the term set to conclude by the end of June or early July.
The high-profile cases yet to be ruled on by the Supreme Court include disputes over President Donald Trump’s ability to fire independent agency heads, state laws barring biological men from women’s sports, and Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order.